Major football clubs have partnered with a UK based digital football platform Dugout.com to provide glimpse into the off the pitch life of football stars. The content available on Dugout will be provided directly by the cubs and will be available exclusively on the platform for 24 hours before they are published anywhere else.

For a start-up with a workforce of about 200 people, the company has managed to sign some of the topmost European clubs from Premier League, SerieA, Bundesliga and Liga BBVA. The idea for the platform came from a poll carried out on 24,000 football fans worldwide which showed that on an average every user followed at least four to five clubs.

The service is currently available only through the website https://dugout.com/ and is free to sign up and use. One can sign up with Facebook, Google or Twitter and set up the account with a user base, a nickname, email id, age. Once logged in you can see the logo of your favourite clubs at the top of the home page followed by the most popular posts from these clubs. User can add and remove any of the clubs from the list any time. The clubs on board include Chelsea, Man City, Arsenal, Liverpool FC, Tottenham Hotspur, FC Barcelona, Atletico Madrid, Real Madrid, AC Milan, Juventus, FC Bayern Munich, Paris Saint Germain and AS Monaco.

The posts uploaded on the platform mostly include photos or videos of players showing football tricks, player interviews, short film on legendary players, or a practice game. User can react with comments or simply a tap on one of the face icons available. User can check out all latest and popular posts from all individual clubs separately in a single page too. The interface looks clutter-free and user-friendly. The search bar at the top makes finding what you want a lot easier.

Though designed more like a social media platform rather than a news or media platform, Dugout doesn’t work on exactly similar lines as Facebook. It doesn’t allow user to follow each other but only the clubs and players on board. Dugout is working on bringing legendary footballers and influencers like Pele on board and create their profiles on the platform. Among active players, Edinson Cavani, Erik Lamela, Paulo Dybala are some of the profiles you can follow right now. The whole idea is to provide a single platform where football fans can get know their favourite players and clubs better without shuffling through their individual club websites or apps separately.

The amount of content it has is pretty limited as of now, but it has been in existence for couple of days only. The fact that it has all the top clubs on board is the key highlight of the platform. Not being able to post anything users want restricts the options for users, but also keeps the platform free form clutter and useless content that you get to see on Facebook.

Dugout.com is available on desktop, smartphone and tablets in eight international languages.